It's a Christmas tradition with airborne gifts: They get stuck in trees. Or fly astray.
Whether model airplanes, Frisbees, kites or what have you, someone inevitably lands one in a tree.
As drones – small lightweight unmanned aerial vehicles and the successor to the modest remote controlled model airplane – become more popular and more people receive them as gifts, the air might be getting a little more crowded. And the trees, too.
Twins Mason and Max Campion, 13, of North Andover, Massachusetts both got drones for Christmas this year. During one of Mason's first flights, the drone, weighing less than half a pound, tilted sideways and got tangled in a few branches in the back yard.
But fire departments are wary of tying up resources pulling machines out of trees, leaving people to fend for themselves. The Campions' father retrieved Mason's drone.
Several people in Amesbury, Massachusetts reported, first on Facebook and then to the city's fire department, that either their new drone or a family member's new drone got hung up in tree branches and the fire department declined to retrieve them.
Methuen, Massachusetts Fire Chief Timothy Sheehy said he had seen drones flying around, but he did not expect his department to help residents in fetching drones out of trees.
However, not all fire departments leave drone, and their pilots, to their own devices. Fire fighters is Salisbury, Maryland used a ladder to rescue Timiya Hutt's drone after it lodged in a tree shortly after Christmas. San Francisco firefighters have been rescuing drones since 2014.